By SIOBHAN BURKE

July 7, 2014

Late one night on Second Avenue, the Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker practiced walking and turning in the studios of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. To the music of Steve Reich and Bach — she couldn’t decide which to use — she played around with permutations of these elemental steps, adding a spiraling torso or swinging arms on top of precisely placed feet.

Ms. De Keersmaeker recalled this scene in a recent phone interview, speaking from Brussels, where her company, Rosas, is based. She was 20 at the time of those rehearsals, and the year was 1981. Her nocturnal studies were the start of “Violin Phase,” a section from what became her celebrated “Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich,” one of four works that Rosas is performing at the Lincoln Center Festival, starting on Tuesday. Ms. De Keersmaeker is largely responsible for transforming Brussels into the European dance mecca that it is today. But she still has a fondness for New York.

“When I come to New York, it would be exaggerated to say I feel like I’m coming home,” she said. “But it was extremely important to me at that point in my life, in my developing as an artist, to be in that city.”

If it’s not quite a homecoming, her Lincoln Center presentation, at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College, through July 16, is a milestone. New York is the final stop on a three-year tour of Ms. De Keersmaeker’s early works, created from 1982 to 1987.

One of those, “Bartok/Mikrokosmos” (1987), has never been seen in New York. Two others — her signature “Rosas Danst Rosas” (1983) and the more obscure “Elena’s Aria” (1984) — last came to New York in the mid-1980s, though “Rosas” has reached dance enthusiasts through the 1997 film version by Thierry De Mey. (Its brush with pop culture in 2011, when Beyoncé borrowed scenes from that film for her “Countdown” video, gave the work even greater exposure, albeit without the artists’ permission.)

Though their moods vary — from the stark euphoria of “Fase” and the brashness of “Rosas” to the almost obstinate slowness of “Elena’s Aria” — the four works share a lucid rigor, the directness of a strong-willed young artist saying, as Ms. De Keersmaeker often does, “This is my dancing.” She described the pieces, collectively, as “the very beginning, where somehow I taught myself how to choreograph — literally the first steps.” She created all four for herself and other women, exploring movement “of a very specific character,” she said, “that I think was more linked to the female body.”

“It can seem reductive,” she added, recalling those early rehearsals, “but I was trying to find movements that I liked.”

Statements like that can seem simple compared with the structural and emotional complexity of Ms. De Keersmaeker’s work. If one thing distinguishes her oeuvre, it’s the rich, intoxicating friction between human architecture and expression, between what the critic Anna Kisselgoff, extolling “Rosas” in The New York Times, called “apparently neutral formal elements and flagrantly strong emotions.”

The choreographer Eleanor Bauer, who studied at Ms. De Keersmaeker’s school, P.A.R.T.S., and has performed with Rosas, elaborated on that tension: “Her work is always very thought through in relation to music and time and space,” she said. “The structure is very firm. But there’s also a human, even romantic, basic thrust inside of what she does. She has a very emotional and even mystical relationship to form.”

Ms. De Keersmaeker, 54, grew up in Wemmel, Belgium, and studied at Mudra, the dance academy founded by the choreographer Maurice Béjart. That institution dominated what was, at the time, an otherwise sleepy dance landscape in Brussels. But through European festivals and her year at Tisch, Ms. De Keersmaeker discovered the work of American postmodernists in dance, theater and music: Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Steve Reich, Robert Wilson, all of whom she cites as influences. (She and Mr. Reich will give a talk after Tuesday’s performance, moderated by the dance critic Deborah Jowitt.)

Chris Dercon, director of the Tate Modern in London, which presented “Fase” in 2012, was living in Brussels when Ms. De Keersmaeker burst onto the scene. In a phone interview, he recalled the who’s-that-girl? curiosity surrounding the choreographer and “her entourage.” He saw her first piece, “Asch,” in 1980, followed in 1982 by “Fase,” her trailblazing entree into European experimental dance.

“She was one of the first to perform something in between dance and expressionistic theater,” Mr. Dercon said, adding that she was also an exceptional administrator and educator.

A desire for sustainability and considerations of legacy may have led to the early works project. Dance stays alive through the doing of it, and Ms. De Keersmaeker said that she felt ready to transmit the four pieces to a new generation. The Lincoln Center casts will include both young and seasoned company members. Ms. De Keersmaeker herself, a petite and potent dancer, will appear in “Fase,” “Elena’s Aria” and the first night of “Rosas.”

“Sometimes I’m surprised by the physical intensity of them,” she said.

Cynthia Loemij, who joined Rosas in 1991, said that of the four, “Rosas” is the most intense: “It’s an almost two-hour piece, with just four women. It feels like a mountain that you have to climb over.” Often noted for its feminist undercurrents, the work made an impact on Ms. Loemij when she first learned it at 21. “I felt like, O.K., these are strong women who have their way of performing, and they’re standing behind what they’re doing, and they’re demanding being listened to.”

But Ms. De Keersmaeker had nothing political in mind. “It was definitely not a choice or a strategy or design to make whatever kind of feminist statement,” she said. “I think that kind of mood — it’s just my very nature.”

Correction: July 9, 2014

A picture caption on Tuesday with an article about performances at the Lincoln Center Festival by the dance company Rosas, using information from Lincoln Center, reversed the identities of the two dancers shown in some editions. Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, the company’s leader, was on the left and Michèle Anne De Mey was on the right.